Cooling systems and customer care
 Because the 9600 Pro core
is built on 0.13 micron manufacturing, Crucial can use a smaller (and
quieter) heatsink. The card has 128MB of KD263228E-GC2A Samsung DDR memory, the same
stuff that's found on the Radeon 9700 Pro/9800 Pro class videocards! Running
at 300 MHz, the memory does not require any additional cooling.
While
this is not really a 'feature' we're happy to see that Crucial has finally,
and dramatically improved their packaging to something with a little colour. A plain white box just isn't
any fun. :-)
On a side note for those of you with older PC's, the Crucial
Radeon 9600 Pro will not work with 2x AGP
motherboards.
Customer service is something you don't
need till you're in trouble!
I find it
very curious that customer service is often something that most people
overlook when purchasing goods.... then when something goes wrong, they're very
willing to complain about it. When I hear someone complaining about a now-dead
product, my response is always; "well it was cheap right?"
As with everything else in life, you get
what you pay for. While the Crucial Radeon 9600 Pro is not the best value
card on the block, it's got some of the best customer care in the industry
backing it up. You don't build up a 9.75 ResellerRatings (with over 700 reviews!) because
you're lucky!
From my
personal dealings with Crucial, if I've ever have a problem with one of their products they go
the extra mile to make sure the problems are fixed. If you have doubts, simply
go to your favorite tech forum and ask about Crucial's customer
service.
Overclocking
I didn't really
know what to expect from the Crucial Radeon 9600 Pro in terms of overclocking,
given that we have seen wildly different responses from the Radeon 9600
Pro chip.... In any case, I started with a core overclock. I immediately raised the clock speed of the core
to 500 MHz (9600XT speeds) and the card didn't have any problems - good so far. However,
in the end I think temperature may have been holding the core back as the maximum core speed
it reached was 506 MHz.
The card
uses 2.8ns Samsung DRAM, which is the same stuff that's
found on Radeon 9700 Pro/Radeon 9800 Pro cards. In theory the memory should
be able to reach at least 357 MHz, but whether the memory could reach that on this
card was another question. Unfortunately we didn't have much luck with
memory overclock. Even when I was being gentle, it max'd out at 315 MHz.
 |
| PCStats Test System Specs: |
| processor: |
intel pentium 4 3.0c |
| clock
speed: |
15 x 200 mhz = 3.0 ghz |
| motherboards: |
gigabyte 8knxp, i875p |
| videocard: |
ati radeon 9800xt
ati radeon 9800
pro
ati radeon 9700 pro
asus radeon 9600xt
gigabyte radeon
9600 pro
msi fx5900u-vtd256
albatron geforcefx 5600 ultra
(rev2)
msi g4ti4600-vt2d8x
crucial radeon 9600 pro |
| memory: |
2x 256mb corsair twinx 3200ll |
| hard drive:
|
40gb wd special ed |
| cdrom: |
nec 52x cd-rom |
| powersupply: |
vantec stealth 470w |
| software setup |
windowsxp build 2600
intel inf 5.03
catalyst
3.9
detonator 52.16 |
| workstation
benchmarks |
3dmark2001se
3dmark03
aquamark
aquamark3
codecreatures
gun
metal 2
quake iii arena ver 1.17
ut2003
aa test, af and aa+af test
3dmark2001se
quake iii arena | |
|
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